Albums Of The Year: Tierra Whack's Dizzying World-Building Will Give You Whiplash

In Tierra Whack's world, MTV stands for gentlemen touch vaginas," ABC means "all gentlemen cry," and BET stands for "bitches eat tacos.” That's according to "Cable Guy," one of the most obtainable points of entry on her shapeshifting, impressive debut, Whack World, a swirling realm all her own where songs disappear just as unsystematically as they materialize. Welcome to an entirely new dimension.


needless to say, available seems like the incorrect word to describe Whack's ephemeral wonder. It's surely immediate, yet that actually undersells how easy the adventurous Whack World — which is comprised of 15 songs, all precisely one minute long — is to get lost indoors of. Without much warning, bouncy beats suddenly lift and yield to toy keyboards or looping carnival melodies, the last phrase Whack sings still hanging in that half second of empty space.


Barely four minutes in and somehow already 1/4 of the way into the experience, she deadpans, "I'm not brilliant nevertheless I improvise." A couple of tracks later, on a song called "Fuck Off," Whack grabs hold of a cartoonish nation twang to spew hexes connected with ass rashes. It's hilarious. It'll also give you whiplash if you're not careful.


Whack grew up in Philadelphia and battle-rapped in her teens under the name Dizzle Dizz. However she wanted more. She idolized Lauryn Hill and André 3000 for their innovation and creative command. "I'm like, I'd like to be them. I'd like to be an artist," Whack told MTV News in an interview at the best of 2018.


Eventually, soon after completing school in Atlanta, she cut the wild "Mumbo Jumbo" soon after a trip to the dentist abandoned her mouth swollen. The track is nearly post-vocal, with Whack's garbled delivery becoming more key than anything she might would be communicating clearly. It came out under her given name in late 2017, however it was just a primer for what trim soon prove to be capable of.


Whack World splits that sort of bold pioneering into 15 shards of shrapnel; Whack adopts new musical personas as she sees fit and discards them in seconds. For music obsessives, this sort of brevity evokes a key, if potentially obsolete, question: Is Whack World an album or a EP? If 2018 really is the year of the EP, long defined as a music assortment of far less than 30 minutes, and if albums are basically already dead anyway, then Whack's contribution snugly works as a EP. Right?


or perhaps albums are just shorter right now. This year, Kanye West oversaw an entire fleet of new albums clocking in at barely over 20 minutes. Rappers like Valee, Earl Sweatshirt, and Chris Crack crammed more songs onto releases by keeping them lean, however brimming with unique flavor. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter at all. Whack World, certainly, is unconcerned by these semantic squabbles. The artist has world-building to do.


Whack focused on crafting something complete and holistic, including a full-album visual that also doubles as a short film. She partnered with directors Thibaut Duverneix and Mathieu Léger for a series of interconnected, moody vignettes that let Whack to inhabit precisely who she wants to be for each track — mention, a bloated insect victim on "Bugs Life" as well as a childlike songbird in "Pet Cemetery"'s Sesame Street-esque puppet sequence. On release day, Whack also unveiled each clip (and and for that reason, each song) individually on Instagram in the ultimate act of meeting music fans where they already live. Soon after you've experienced the songs through the the visual, it's hard to hear them without conjuring those striking images. And maybe that's the point.


Last week, at Billboard's Girls in Music event, Whack presented the Trailblazer award to another pioneer in the field of (e)motion pictures, Janelle Monáe. Nevertheless then Monáe flipped the script. In a series of escalating praises that left Whack shaking her head in gracious disbelief, Monáe delivered a knockout compliment. "I just desire to thank you for sacrificing your time to exhibit this award to me," she mentioned, looking directly at Whack.


There's truth there. From the time Whack walked out onstage up until as soon as she walked into the back with each other with Monáe, the entire encounter lasted about six minutes. That's six Tierra Whack songs right there.